Coming 'round the bend....

Ah, I'm coming 'round the bend in that funky little side track I've been on the past month or so, and it feels really nice. It's hard not to feel kinda nice on a day like today - it's cloudy and breezy and mild, the world is lushly green and still dripping from yesterday's thunderstorms, and the air has a quality that it occasionally gets in Raleigh, it's refracting light in just such a way.....it sparkles just a little when the sun comes out, and everything looks as though it has just a bit of a sheen. Not quite a glow, it's less like light and more like energy. Like auras. It's very animate, though it is air and trees and clouds. It's really beautiful. Makes me think of....

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty in the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Ah.
Doesn't that just open something up inside you and make you want to sigh with relief?

This funk I've been in, it's got me thinking about funks and how they come and how they (hopefully) get gone. It's so easy to get ourselves stuck in a funk, easy as a habit. But the getting unstuck, that takes some time and effort and faith and hope. Hard. I think that one of the most important things that we can learn to do in life is to help ourselves out of a funk, to have a forward orientation and put one foot in front of the other and climb up out of a stuck place, get back up someplace high enough to see what's on the horizon. We need help, we all do, but ultimately, we have to do the climbing ourselves.

So here's to getting un-stuck, to the hope and faith in ourselves and the ones we love and the world that helps us get through the stuck times, and to all the good teachers who've helped me get un-stuck from previous funks. I'm really proud to say that I learned something. :)

UPDATE: Relatively recent garden pictures from 5/14! I think the way this slide show thingy works, is if you click on a picture, it'll take you to the site where all the pictures are posted. Check out the pumpkin jungle, I think that's my favorite picture!